Zara wanted to get ahead in school. She wanted the cute guy. She wanted to win the game. Trouble was, everybody else had expensive brain implants, augmented muscles, and those pretty tailored bodies. She had none of those things. Of course, she work...
Xavier Mayor wouldn't take it. He wouldn't sit beneath their feet. He was better than those protons, Sorry Zara Vals and Flunky Finn Komea.
The teacher treated them like grand nobles, as if they were king and queen of the class. Sing praises to their massless eminence. Pay homage to their spinning sovereignty.
They got to sit on top of everybody else, Sorry and Flunky, looking down on their royal domain. In fact, they sat right on him. Sorry's feet nearly stomped on his head.
Sorry could spit on him and the teacher would cheer. It would tell Sorry how perfect and beautiful was her magnificent spittle, what great form Sorry had with the loogie, how Sorry could propel it faster and better than anybody else. And if he smashed Sorry into the wall the teacher would marvel at the beautiful artwork of Sorry's bloody pizza face.
No, Xavier wouldn't do it. He wouldn't bow down, not to them.
"Who can recite the seven phases of Aubrey Probo's revolution?" the teacher said. Sorry Zara raised her laser arm first. Of course, she did. That's the fifth question she answered, all in a row.
She rattled off the seven phases as if she had been there, as if she had told Aubrey Probo what to do and how to do it: Discovery of axions, proving the axions, conflict with science, saving the world, obeisance to Axion, dismantling the Imperium, reordering the world.
"Excellent, Zara Vals," the teacher said. "You're doing well again today."
And if Sorry wasn't answering the questions, then it was Flunky Finn, trading off answers back and forth, Sorry, then Flunky, and then Sorry again.
The teacher displayed the class credits, a holographic blue board listing all of their names. Sorry and Flunky tied at the top. They far exceeded Xavier. They gained more points than anyone else, and they kept increasing while he kept decreasing.
What was worse, the teacher wouldn't stop talking about Aubrey Probo, how Aubrey Probo did this, and how Aubrey Probo did that. It droned on and on about the Axionarchy or some stupid massless government that Aubrey Probo founded, its beauty and its symmetry, its perfection, how it was so much better than democracy, and all that spinning nonsense.
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What trash. Who could give a fart? If Sorry gave one, of course, the teacher would say it smelled like perfume. She would earn extra points for her pleasing aroma, and then Flunky would have to give one too just to even the score. That was maddening enough right there.
The teacher got on Xavier's case, and that angered him even more. It got too close, that stick-like head and those irritating red lights. He could smell the sick ozone of its pulsed plasma thrusters. The teacher had those stinky thrusters built into its two feet. They stunk it up real bad.
The teacher got in Xavier's space sometimes when it asked a question like it could read his mind. He wanted to snap its stick-of-a-head and put out those irritating lights, but it carried blasters that could do some protons. They could vaporize anything. He liked to think about what those blasters might do to Sorry and Flunky.
